Gender differences in the impact of job mobility on earnings: The role of occupational segregation

In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the extent to which the impact of switching firms (inter-firm mobility) on wages varies between men and women. Using data from the NLSY79 from 1979 to 2012, this paper extends existing research by exploring how occupational segregation and individual level factors contribute to gender differences in the impact of voluntary inter-firm mobility on wages. The paper also examines how patterns vary depending on education level. Findings suggest that men without a college education receive greater wage gains from voluntary inter-firm mobility than similarly educated women although there is no overall gender difference for individuals with a bachelor's degree. The wage returns to voluntary inter-firm mobility for both men and women increase as a function of the male representation in the occupation. For individuals without a college education, the male premium to voluntary inter-firm mobility is largest in highly male dominated occupations. However, women with a bachelor's degree employed in highly male dominated occupations use voluntary inter-firm mobility to narrow the gender wage gap.     

Globalization, labor market transformation, and metropolitan earnings inequality

Numerous studies have noted the increasing levels of inequality in American society, but relatively few have linked this inequality to the dynamics of the global economy. In this study, we examine the impact of five measures of globalization (global capital, foreign direct investment, exports, foreign born non-citizens, and foreign born citizens) and six measures of labor market transformation (deindustrialization, corporate restructuring, bureaucratic burden, casualization, bad jobs, and multiple job holding) on metropolitan-level earnings inequality of full-time, full-year workers 16 years and older. Our study makes several major contributions to the literature. First, we update and extend the long line of studies on metropolitan earnings inequality. Second, we show that these various dimensions of globalization and labor market transformation exert independent and mainly polarizing effects on the earnings distributions of metropolitan areas, net of controls for labor market structure and sociodemographic variables. Third, we demonstrate the benefits of looking at the causes of inequality in the upper and lower tails of the earnings distribution. Finally, we develop a procedure to estimate counterfactual values of earnings inequality for all major metropolitan areas in the US in 2000. In the process, the paper provides a comprehensive accounting of the impact of globalization and labor market transformation on metropolitan earnings inequality.     

Gender inequality in earnings in industrialized East Asia

Using data from the 2006 Family Module of the East Asian Social Survey, we use regression-based methods to decompose the sex gap in hourly wages in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. We find that Taiwan has the smallest sex gap in wages, and is also distinctive in that employed women have more education than men, on average. Japan is distinctive in the high proportion of women consigned to non-regular (temporary, often part-time) jobs, and this factor explains much more of the gap in Japan than elsewhere. Korea is distinctive in having an extremely high proportion of men who are college graduates; therefore, in Korea gender differences in education and occupational placement explain more of the gap than elsewhere. Despite many historical similarities between these societies, our analysis points out the heterogeneity within industrialized East Asia when it comes to gender inequality.     

Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process

While much research has documented the pattern and extent of sex segregation of workers once they are employed, few studies have addressed the pre-hire mechanisms that are posited to produce sex segregation in employment. While the notion of a labor queue—the rank order of the set of people that employers choose among—plays a prominent role in pre-hire accounts of job sex sorting mechanisms, few studies have examined the ways in which job candidates are sorted into labor queues. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms by which labor queues contribute to the gendering of jobs by studying the hiring process for all jobs at a call center. Being placed in a queue has a clear gendering effect on the hiring process: the sex distribution of applicants who are matched to queues and those who are rejected at this phase diverge, and among those assigned to queues, women are prevalent in queues for low pay, low status jobs. The screening process also contributes to the gendering of the population of hires at this firm. Females are more prevalent among hires than they are among candidates at initial queue assignment. Among high status jobs, however, males are more prevalent than females. Moreover, there are important wage implications associated with matching to queues. While there are large between-queue sex differences in the paid wages associated with allocation to queues, once allocated to queues the wage differences between male and female candidates are nil. Consequently, the roots of gender wage inequality in this setting lie in the initial sorting of candidates to labor queues.     

From general discrimination to segmented inequality: Migration and inequality in urban China

Internal migration in China during the last three decades, the largest in human history, offers a rare opportunity to understand inequalities in the making. Using data spanning 10 years from China’s largest metropolis, Shanghai, this study assesses how enduring state institutions interplay with the spread of market forces to shape income inequality between migrants and native urban workers. Though the wages of both Chinese migrants and urban workers rose considerably, economic restructuring during the decade under study resulted in diminished privileges for urbanites and subsequently increased collision between migrants and urban workers in the private sectors. These shifts, rather than substantially reducing inequality, have led to an evolving form of inequality, from an initial general blatant discrimination against migrants across the board, to a new and more subtle form of inequality characterized by substantial segmented discrimination against migrants within economic sectors, with the degree of inequality varying from sector to sector. We discuss how this changing inequality reflects complementary rather than competing roles of the state and market institutions in inequality creation and maintenance.     

Uneven transitions: Period- and cohort-related changes in gender attitudes in China, 1995-2007

This paper analyzes temporal variations in two gender attitudes in China: beliefs about gender equality and perspectives on women’s combined work and family roles. It uses the most currently available population series from the 1995, 2001 and 2007 World Value Surveys of 4500 respondents and a series of multilevel cross-classified models to properly estimate period and cohort effects. Attitudes toward women’s dual roles manifest neither period nor cohort effects; the population displays a universal high level of acceptance of women’s paid employment. Orientations toward gender equality manifest both cohort and period effects: members of the youngest cohort of both sexes hold the most liberal attitudes; the positive effect of college education has increased over time. Attitude toward gender equality in China displays neither a shift toward conservatism nor an over-time trend toward egalitarianism in 1995-2007, a time of rapid economic growth.     

Investigating the organizational sources of high-wage earnings growth and rising inequality

Recent studies indicate that the growth of earnings inequality in the United States since the late 1970s reflects organizational changes in the process of earnings determination. Existing research primarily focuses on workplace changes that reduce earnings levels for middle- and low-wage workers despite the importance of high-wage gains for rising inequality. This paper investigates how organizational context affects the relationship between occupation and earnings, with a focus on high-wage occupations. The earnings associated with low-wage occupations do not vary across industry groups. By contrast, the earnings advantages associated with high-wage occupations vary across industry groups in relation to the industry’s prevalence of performance pay practices. Pay initiatives that reward individuals for company performance explain much of the inter-industry variance in managerial and professional earnings slopes. The growth of performance-based pay represents an organizational change in earnings determination that may serve as a mechanism of high-wage earnings growth and rising inequality.     

Trends in gender segregation in the choice of science and engineering majors

Numerous theories have been put forward for the high and continuing levels of gender segregation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, but research has not systematically examined the extent to which these theories for the gender gap are consistent with actual trends. Using both administrative data and four separate longitudinal studies sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), we evaluate several prominent explanations for the persisting gender gap in STEM fields related to mathematics performance and background and general life goals, and find that none of them are empirically satisfactory. Instead, we suggest that the structure of majors and their linkages to professional training and careers may combine with gender differences in educational goals to influence the persisting gender gap in STEM fields. An analysis of gendered career aspirations, course-taking patterns, and pathways to medical and law school supports this explanation.     

Economic deprivation and racial segregation: Comparing Superfund sites in Portland, Oregon and Detroit, Michigan

The research presented here weighs the ability of two major explanations of social inequality—Massey and Denton’s racial segregation explanation and Wilson’s emphasis on economic deprivation (concentrated poverty)—to predict environmental inequality. Two sets of logistic regression analyses are used to predict the location of Superfund sites in Portland, Oregon and Detroit, Michigan providing a conditional understanding of environmental inequality within a larger sociological context. The analysis includes a general examination of the two theories in all census tracts in both cities and a set of analyses focusing upon Black neighborhoods in Detroit. The findings indicate that there is support for explanations of environmental inequality that include both racial segregation and economic deprivation, but that the more powerful of the two is economic deprivation. The results suggest that even though African-American neighborhoods disproportionately house Superfund sites, these facilities are more likely to be located in Black neighborhoods that are economically deprived.     

Preferences,constraints, and the process of sex segregation in college majors: A choice analysis

The persistence of horizontal sex segregation in higher education continues to puzzle social scientists. To help resolve this puzzle, we analyze a sample of college entrants in Germany with a discrete choice design that allows for social learning from the experiences of others. We make at least two contributions to the state of research. First, we test whether essentialist gender stereotypes affect major selection mostly through internalization or rather as external constraints that high school graduates adapt their behavior to. Empirically, we find that internalized vocational interests better explain gendered major choices than conformance with friends' and parents' expectations does. Second, we scrutinize whether segregation results from women's anticipation of gendered family roles or from their anticipation of sex-based discrimination, but we find no evidence for either of these hypotheses. As in most previous studies, differences in mathematics achievement fail to explain gendered patterns of selection into college majors.     

Feeding the pipeline: Gender,occupational plans,and college major selection

In this article, we analyze gender differences in college major selection for respondents to the Education Longitudinal Study (2002–2006), focusing on educational pathways through college that lead to science, engineering, or doctoral-track medicine occupations and to non-doctoral track clinical and health sciences occupations. We show that gender differences in college major selection remain substantial, even for a cohort in which rates of enrollment in postsecondary education are more than ten percent higher for young women than for young men. Consistent with other recent research, we demonstrate that neither gender differences in work–family goals nor in academic preparation explain a substantial portion of these differences. However, the occupational plans of high school seniors are strong predictors of initial college major selection, a finding that is revealed only when occupational plans are measured with sufficient detail, here by using the verbatim responses of students. We also find that the association between occupational plans and college major selection is not attributable to work–family orientation or academic preparation. Finally, we find gender differences in the associations between occupational plans and college major selection that are consistent with prior research on STEM attrition, as well as with the claim that attrition also affects the selection of majors that are gateways into doctoral-track medicine. We discuss the implications of the predictive power of occupational plans formed in adolescence for understanding sex segregation and for policies intended to create a gender-balanced STEM and doctoral-level medical workforce.     

转型期社会信任的影响机制——市场化、个人资本与社会交往因素探讨

本文利用中国综合社会调查(CGSS)2005年的数据,基于因子分析将社会信任区分为强社会联系、一般社会联系和弱社会联系三个不同维度的信任,通过结构方程模型考察了市场化、个人资本与社会交往对社会信任的影响机制。研究结果表明,个人资本对上述三个维度的信任均没有显著影响,这否定了王绍光等人的新理性解释模型,说明信任不是个体层面的问题,而是社会层面的问题。市场化对强社会联系的信任没有影响,但是对一般社会联系和弱社会联系的信任均有显著的影响,但信任度提高不大。这说明市场化扩大了人际信任的范围,有利于提高整体社会的信任度。研究结果还表明,无论是熟人间的社会交往还是社团性的社会交往对社会信任都有显著的影响,且影响较大,这表明社会信任正是在社会互动中生产出来的。人际交往的范围扩大和频率增加,有望提高整体社会的信任度。     

Gender composition of occupations and occupational characteristics: Explaining their true relationship by using longitudinal data

This paper analyzes the relationship between the gender composition of occupations and occupational characteristics that describe working arrangements and qualification requirements. While prior studies showed associations between the representation of females in occupations and these occupational characteristics, we are the first to explain their true relationship by applying an analytical research design. In this regard, we add three alternative relationship patterns to the widespread assumption that occupational characteristics affect the representation of females in occupations. First, it is possible that the relationship works in the opposite direction. Second, the relationship does not necessarily have to be causal but can just be a historical connection. Third, the representation of females in occupations may follow a self-enforcing cycle. To put the relationship between the gender composition of occupations and occupational characteristics to the test, we create a unique occupation panel dataset that aggregates individual data from the 1996 to 2012 waves of the German Microcensus. Our results confirm that occupational characteristics determine the representation of females in occupations. Moreover, we find some evidence that the representation of females follows a self-enforcing cycle.     

Socioeconomic background and racial earnings inequality: A propensity score analysis

Does a racial earnings gap exist among individuals who come from similar childhood socioeconomic backgrounds? Is the racial earnings gap larger or smaller for those from higher or lower socioeconomic origins? This research addresses these questions by taking a counterfactual approach to estimating the residual racial pay gap between non-Hispanic black and white men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The findings indicate that the racial earnings gap is larger among those from lower-middle class and working class childhood backgrounds than among those from upper-middle class backgrounds, for whom the racial pay gap is indistinguishable from zero. Compared to their more advantaged counterparts, black men from lower-middle and working class backgrounds have more difficulty rising above their socioeconomic origins relative to white men from similar social class backgrounds. Racial earnings equality among those from upper-middle class backgrounds suggests that the high levels of racial inequality often observed among those with college and professional degrees may in fact reflect heterogeneous childhood socioeconomic backgrounds among the college educated—backgrounds that continue to have an effect on earnings despite individual academic achievements.     

The female advantage in college academic achievements and horizontal sex segregation

This study offers a structural explanation for the female advantage in college completion rates, stressing the importance of horizontal sex segregation across fields of study in shaping educational outcomes and gender inequality. Results from a nationally representative sample of students who matriculated at 4-year institutions in 1995 reveal a high level of gender segregation by field of study. Field of study creates the immediate learning environment for the students and between-major differences in academic and social arrangements—such as different grading norms, academic intensity, size and social support—shape both female and male performance. We find that this variation is a key factor in the creation of the female advantage in grades and graduation likelihood. The simulation we conduct demonstrates that if sex integration were achieved and both groups had the male distribution of majors, the female advantage in graduation likelihood and grades, which remains after socioeconomic and academic factors are netted out, would be substantially reduced.     

Visible and invisible hands intertwined: State-market symbiotic interactions and changing income inequality in urban China

Analyzing the restructured political economy in 21st-century urban China, this project develops a “symbiotic interaction” model and reconceptualizes the state-market relationship to appreciate the changing inequality patterns. As the state and market have formed a long-term, intimate relationship, dynamic state policies interact with the fragmented labor market to redefine a set of socioeconomic capitals and statuses in affecting income inequality. Drawing empirical evidence from the Chinese General Social Survey 2003 and 2013 data, this paper employs linear and unconditional quantile regressions to compare income disparity patterns along both temporal and socio-spatial dimensions. The findings show that multiple key factors, including human capital (e.g., college education), political capital (e.g., party membership), occupational status (e.g., self-employment), and organizational type (e.g., state-owned enterprise), have all changed their economic returns over time and also played different roles for various earning groups. These findings suggest that we should conduct substantive institutional analyses of the evolving state-market relationship and their interplay to achieve a deeper understanding of the reshuffled stratification order in contemporary China. The proposed analytical framework also has broad implications in the research of other transitional economies.     

社会资本、市场化改革与企业绩效——来自中国上市公司的面板证据

本文通过对2004～2006年沪市210家上市公司高管人员的政治网络、经营网络和学校网络进行赋值,将其社会资本予以量化。我们将企业所在地的市场化程度引入模型,检验社会资本与市场化改革对于企业经营绩效的影响。本文得到的主要结论包括:(1)用政治网络度量的企业家社会资本对企业绩效存在显著的正向关系;(2)企业家社会资本对企业绩效的作用随着市场化的推进逐渐减弱;(3)企业家政治网络对企业绩效作用的影响高于经营网络和校友网络。     

Field of study variation throughout the college pipeline and its effect on the earnings gap: Differences between ethnic and immigrant groups in Israel

This study demonstrates the analytical leverage gained from considering the entire college pipeline—including the application, admission and graduation stages—in examining the economic position of various groups upon labor market entry. The findings, based on data from three elite universities in Israel, reveal that the process that shapes economic inequality between different ethnic and immigrant groups is not necessarily cumulative. Field of study stratification does not expand systematically from stage to stage and the position of groups on the field of study hierarchy at each stage is not entirely explained by academic preparation. Differential selection and attrition processes, as well as ambition and aspirations, also shape the position of ethnic groups in the earnings hierarchy and generate a non-cumulative pattern. These findings suggest that a cross-sectional assessment of field of study inequality at the graduation stage can generate misleading conclusions about group-based economic inequality among workers with a bachelor’s degree.     

Varying weekly work hours and earnings instability in the Great Recession

Unstable work schedules are increasingly a prominent stratification outcome, particularly for low-wage workers. Nationally representative and longitudinal research on the topic is limited, however. This article examines varying numbers of weekly work hours among hourly workers, their increase during the Great Recession of the late 2000s, and their impact on growing earnings instability. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the cumulative probability of ever reporting varying hours among hourly workers increased from 36 percent between 2004 and 2007 to 46 percent between 2008 and 2012. Changes in state-level economic conditions, particularly state-level unemployment rates and economic growth, largely explain the increase in varying hours, consistent with arguments that employers pass the costs of volatile demand onto workers. Finally, variance function regressions show the growth of varying hours accounts for the significant increase in earnings instability from 2004–7 to 2008–12.     

关于我国公共服务市场化若干问题的分析

公共服务市场化反映了公共服务供给领域政府职能的调整和市场价值的回归,就其内涵而言,我国公共服务市场化应该包括目标和手段两个方面。通过对我国公共服务市场化的阻力和动力作进一步分析,可以得出我国公共服务市场化改革的有效对策组合。